Stay positive

See I hard coped the "Believe that most people are good" thing, and then I saw numerical data that proves that most people (in the USA), in fact, not only want me to die; but hate most people not like them enough to support a sleazy dictator wanna-be and support a fascist regime, just to destroy the lives of other people who they see as "competition" or "lesser" or "undesirables".

Believe that most people are good.

I'd love to if they didn't show their ass IRL as often as online.

I used to believe people were good, but over the years I've just seen worse and worse behavior from the general public to the point that the only way I could possibly believe most people were fundamentally good would be to reject reality.

Yeah, talk to enough conservatives IRL and you'll know this is bullshit.

Selfish, evil human beings. Whether they realize it or not.

Except for the elites, I think it's more constructive to think of them as brainwashed by an ancient meme; potentially redeemable.
- Emphasis on 'potentially'. Don't waste too much time on them, some of them get off on watching you uselessly spend your time and energy and sanity on them. Brainwashing doesn't work like it does in comic books. These are people who were already willing to and capable of rationalizing putting kids into cages and the 'brainwashing' just gave them an easy explanation.
  It's like a person who has committed rape. Even if they come out later as an anti-rape activist and they're publicly remorseful and they do a lot of work to make up for the harm they caused you still aren't gonna leave them alone with your sister.

Nah, I’ve talked to a lot of republicans in real life and almost all of them are just fundamentally bad people who derive joy from hurting and oppressing others.

I legitimately know someone exactly like that. It blows my mind how anybody could be so sociopathic, no human compassion whatsoever, even for the people supposedly nearest & dearest to him.

I think the belief that most people are good actually causes people to attack the ones calling out bad behavior, rather than calling out the bad behavior itself, which is a major contributing cause of many societal issues. Some people are truly just bad people, and we need to learn to accept this. I did after the last few years in politics. Can't be an algorithm when they elected the president. "Stay positive" is bad advice when you're trying to accurately identify and solve a problem where things aren't positive.

Does it matter that most people are good if most people in power aren't, and they have an army of similar-minded people following their orders?

Because there's more of us than there are of them, so perhaps we can do something about it.

How could most people be good if they voted for the the pedo king three times?

Most people did not vote which is a different kind of bad
You'd probably be shocked at how ignorant most Americans are. See those man-in-the-street interviews Mamdani had with NYC Trump voters? They seemed to know nothing about Trump, just had vibes.
If you get your news and political views from FaceBook, you're going to be ignorant as hell. And if you throw Fox News in, you'll come out knowing even less.
On top of all that, over half of Americans top out at a 6th-grade reading level. 20% are flat out illiterate. Can't find the stat again, but an appalling number of us can't follow along in a novel.
We can't fix anything in this country until we fix education. How can we even speak to people about climate change, collapsing ecosystems, repeating 20th century history, anything at all, when they don't have a basic education?
- I totally agree that most Trump voters simply know nothing about him. I maintain an acquaintance with a Trump supporter kind of just out of curiosity and they know incredibly little about him as a person, or the things he's doing as president. They're generally just unaware. He didn't even know that Trump abused emergency powers to bypass Congress to impose tariff taxes on Americans.
  But that doesn't mean they aren't a bad person. Not engaging with the democracy you live in and ensuring that it remains healthy makes you a bad person, in my opinion. Too many people sacrificed their lives to give us democracy and not engaging responsibly is unbelievably disrespectful and makes you a bad person. Voting for someone without knowing anything about them makes you a bad person.

How I wish that was true.

I’m with you. I mean, its probably the bubble I live in, but I’m so tired of trying to talk to my friends and family about all of this but I’m dismissed as being paranoid or they tell me that Biden was just as bad or frankly most often just some dismissive joke in response.
I’m guessing about as many people care about this as there are who support all of it. The remaining 40-50% is just checked out and thinks this is just politics as usual. That’s my impression anyway.

This, more than anything, is why I stick to the Fediverse. There's some negativity here, but it's organic, and generally not being conjured out of thin air to get me to buy shit.

When I log on to FB to check my DM's, it's very obvious what the algo is doing, and I can't be bothered to indulge it.

Oooh, and here I thought the GOP was a bunch of Nazis fucking children. Guess it's just the algorithm fucking children and opening concentration camps.

We get it, you disagree with OP. Have you considered your comment may come across as a level of unhinged and impotent rhetoric that only moreso proves OP's point? I hope you find peace soon, and I absolutely relate with your distaste of the current atrocities✌️
- So are they atrocities or not? Because you seem awfully chill about the whole thing, like they're mild inconveniences that aren't actively ruining millions of lives
- You Republicans never cease to make me laugh.
- So which is it? Are these atrocities happening, or is it just the algorithm pushing that narrative? You can't have it both ways (it's real, btw).

Not with this government, 3rd world countries are installing solar while our leader is canceling solar and i cannot get panels

Can I get some data on the "most people are good" bit?

Here's my counter: most people are idiots
- That doesn't make them good. Being stupid is a rather limited excuse in the face of such great evils we have today.
When it comes to people you meet each day (friends, colleagues, schoolmates, ...), are there people among them you'd call 'genuinely evil'? Is it a majority of them?
- Yes and yes, unfortunately.
- Daily reminder that 30% of people would vote to bring back chattel slavery if it was convenient.
- Honestly? Yeah, it's well over a majority. I wouldn't call them 'purely evil', but 'genuinely evil' is pretty much the norm in society. People just tend to compartmentalize their evil.
- I reject the premise. The term "Evil" is meaningless.
@theq@lemmy.zip @LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone
@politicalmemes@lemmy.world
I can't help but recall of two quotes: one from Rousseau who said "Humans are born good but society corrupts them", and another from Hobbes who said "Humans are a wolf to humans". While it seems like both thinkers couldn't agree with each other because both statements look different, the logical implications from Rousseau inevitably leads to that of Hobbes. I'll try to explain my point below.
When Rousseau says "society corrupts good humans", he implies the existence of not-good humans because, as we know, society is made out of people (not just Soylent Green). Rousseau implies that the not-good humans were once good until they got corrupted by earlier not-good humans, which were corrupted by even earlier not-good humans... somewhere, non-goodness was born. Causality requires that a non-goodness stemmed from some kind of "patient zero of evilness".
Now, religions would be tempted to think of this "patient zero" as something supernatural: Shaitan, Iblis, Angra Mainyu... It's not exactly wrong (as archetypal representation), but it's not accurate either: it's not something too otherworldly, it's right in front of us or, should I say, inside us.
Take Derren Brown's "The Push" (a documentary about social compliance and conformity): before the auction gala where (spoiler)the person was cluelessly played by a hidden script to push someone from a rooftop, commiting murder to (in their mind) save themself(/spoiler), Derren conducted a "selection process" where the candidates would answer a test: unbeknownst to them, the test was beyond a questionnaire, it was evaluating who would keep standing up and sitting whenever a bell rang. They weren't told to do so: they were, instead, socially pressured to do it, because all the other candidates were doing it. It's the "monkey see, monkey do".
Those who didn't watch The Push (watch it, it's illuminating) might ask: if the candidates weren't told to do it (switch between sitting and standing whenever a bell rings), how did the behavior emerge? The behavior was initially seeded by actors, people who initially acted on it. Then things got funnier: one by one, actors were removed and fresh, clueless candidates were added, until no actors were in the room, yet the behavior continued. It was carried among "generations" (batches of candidates).
There was no devil behind this behavior. One could argue "Derren Brown was the devil behind the scenes, conducting a social experiment", but something motivated those actors (e.g. money), just like something motivated the hypothetical "first evil human" to be evil, except... something also motivated clueless candidates to imitate it, just like something motivated the "Rousseau's good humans" to spread societal corruption.
It's not a devil: it's humans, it's us. We're born with this wolf inside, and it just takes a "push" for it to howl. It's inherent to us because it's inherent to Nature.
- Humans are situational. That's what makes them interesting and worthwhile. Anything that is the same in every situation has no heart.
  I tend to think that you really see what people are made of in a tight spot. In a nice situation, everyone finds it easy to be kind. But even those who rise to a challenge and show true heart only do so when they really believe it is an option. That is the point of having hope.

Or just stay away from algorithmic social media, or maybe i mean ad-based for-profit algorithmic social media.

Lemmy doesn't seem to have a particular bent toward conflict the way that Facebook does (I know they're different in a lot of ways). Bluesky doesn't seem to have it, either, although we could still be in the "bait" phase before they "switch."

not to mention all the troll bots. If you are arguing online, theres a good chance its just a bot/

I know it's scary

You have to discipline Algo like a rigid schoolmarm. You will show me lo-fi cyberpunk synthwave. Darker. Darker!

If you're looking for recent news tempered by the context of US history, look up Prof. Heather Cox Richardson and her offerings. Also MSW Media (specifically Daily Beans ) will at least commiserate with you when you hear the bad news, and will offer some hopeful insights.

Mainstream media is not your friend. Don't give them time except to verify news you think is important enough to verify, and then use multiple sources and cull the specific consistent facts.

Which ironically I believe is the problem with Lemmy too. I tend to browse unfiltered/all/top 6 hours (with the exception of .ml) and the amount of doom and gloom on here either depresses me or makes me angry with everything being reported.

I find I have to step away or switch to highly curated stuff that doesn’t have a drop of real world events in it.

Come hang out with us at !wholesome@reddthat.com and !NiceMemes@sopuli.xyz there is only joy there
There's a certain amount of catharsis in commiseration. Not all the negativity is due to algorithmic curation; a decent amount is legit sadness/anger at the way things are going in the world. Which is valid, imho. But I also understand that it requires some serious hand-curating to get only positive information. Reddit is a lot harder in that regard, as well.
- I think they’re saying they use the “Top -> 6 hrs” category to sort posts when they browse.

I'm not on any of those platforms, though, and I've been angry since the mid-2000s at least. Maybe I should try to be less angry...? No. No, I don't think that's viable at the moment.

The GOP fuck children, btw.

Maybe drop a platform owned by a modern-day facist who keeps using your tweets to train his attempt and cyberdyne?

Mastodon and BlueSky are right there.

Anyone leaving Twitter or any other corpo service should not go to BlueSky. That’s the same shit waiting to happen/
- I'll leave Bluesky when it happens, don't worry. Until then it's a pretty cool place so far. 👍
Is bluesky worth using? Privately owned and US based so can't be immune to takeover or subpoena
- lemmy is where it's at anyway.
- Actual scientifically minded people there. Might as well use it until a takeover happens.
- Bsky markets with being decentralised while being not. I mean people can have their own data servers but because of DIDs moderation and other things go back in the hands of the company behind it.
  Another red flag is that a main investor is crypto bros and that the ceo or something is crypto friendly but they gave promises not to shove crypto currency up their users.
  Is it worth using?
  If you use mastodon + bridgy i dont think so
  If you want to use it because all your friends are using it: i wont stop you but thats what bridgy is there for
  If you dont like platforms where a significant amount is a linux user: then maybe bsky is better
  and a + of bsky is that users can make their own algorithms i think easily and that those can get shared.

Also it's often highly subjective what even is "good". That's the root cause of a lot of problems in the first place. Subjective instincts that are considered an objective ethics.

It's a nice thought. Absurd, but nice.

Most people are incoherent and parochial. That's not 'good', but it's certainly not what you see online.

I do very much recommend talking to people. The conversations can be amazing if you hold a straight face.

People are coherent in my experience but parochial is a fair descriptor. Many can talk your ear off about the shiny object they bought, the minutia of the statistics of their team's star player, or the resort they recently visited while having little to no awareness of broader concepts. Some are completely aloof to concepts that don't involve them.
Whether they're good people.. That depends on how you set the standard. I believe that a fairly self absorbed person can still be a good person but there are many who would disagree with that.
- I wouldn't say most are good or bad.
  But seriously talk to someone at a cafe or bus stop about politics, philosophy, or science. It gets goofy fast.

Will, listening to a very narrow group of people (the ones you talk to) exposes you to a whole other set of risks.

The real key is education & (legit) trust in institutions.

No, Simu. You are detached from reality. Stop trying to humanize POS Nazi garbage. Stop trying to reintegrate them. I will NEVER forgive

I just had the realization that chatgpt keeps me addicted by using my curiousity…

That's not quite the same, though notifications and spam through the app would count.
The corpo LLMs do have a huge sycophancy bias, which would contribute as an addictive effect, I guess (and get people down strange psycological rabbit holes like you see in the news). I'd suggest switching between different models, especially the 'niche' open-weights finetunes on OpenRouter and such, that aren't so sycophantic. And also aren't OpenAI, because Altman is literally a blood sucking con artist.